Flowers in full bloom

Chapter 446 Harvest

The weather was fine these days, so the buds told the farmers to start harvesting rapeseed. They spread tarpaulins spliced ​​together on the open space.

Then use a sickle to cut the entire rapeseed from the root and carefully pile it on the oilcloth. Be careful not to use heavy hands or feet, and be sure not to hit the seed-bearing part of the rapeseed stalk, lest the rapeseed fall into the mud, which would ruin all your efforts.

After all the rapeseed is harvested, it is placed on a tarpaulin to dry. If the rapeseed is turned over frequently, the rapeseed can be sorted out in less than ten days.

There is no machinery like in my world now, so Hualei can only use the most primitive method to thresh the rapeseed. Fortunately, threshing rapeseed is relatively simple.

As long as the rape stalks are dried thoroughly and stepped on lightly, the rapeseed is almost threshed. Then use a flail to gently hit the rape stalks, and all the rapeseed on the stalks will fall off.

However, the rapeseed shells will also fall off, and these shells and impurities need to be cleaned out, so some tools are needed.

Uncle Zhao had also prepared Hualei in advance by splitting the bamboo into thin strips, and then weaving the strips into a net-like hollow bamboo plaque.

The size of the mesh can only filter out the size of rapeseed, so that the rapeseed can pass through, and the rapeseed shell impurities that are much larger than rapeseed will be separated out.

After such screening, the rapeseed is generally cleaner. However, there are still particles of similar size to the rapeseed and impurities that cannot be separated by the bamboo plaque. This is where the valley windmill comes in.

This one was available at Baihua Village, so Hualei moved the windmill to the basin and began to do the final cleaning of the rapeseed.

Pour the rapeseed into the truck bed on top of the grain windmill, first shake the handle of the grain windmill to let the wind blow out, and then let the rapeseed roll down from the opening on the bottom of the truck bed.

At this time, the wind generated by the hand-cranked machine passed through the falling rapeseeds, and the light shells, debris and grass clippings flew out from the air outlet and fell outside.

The full rapeseeds are heavier, so they fall vertically from the bucket mouth and fall into the bamboo basket below. In this way, the rapeseeds become very clean.

Taking advantage of the sunny weather, the rapeseed was dried for a few days. After it was dry, Emperor Shengwu's shadow guards came again. After leaving the rapeseed seeds for the second half of the year to Hualei, the rest of the rapeseed was loaded onto a carriage and moved away.

Hua Lei dared not speak out against Emperor Shengwu's forced buying and selling. Fortunately, the banknotes given by Emperor Shengwu were quite satisfactory. The shadow guard gave Hua Lei 20,000 taels of banknotes.

Holding the brand new banknotes, Hualei put them into her own money box. Now she had more and more banknotes, which was great. It seemed that she could buy farms and shops without any hesitation.

After the rapeseed was harvested, Hualei led the people to plow all the land without stopping. Because they had already planted a crop of rapeseed, they could now use oxen to help plow the land, so the process was much faster.

All the pots were deeply plowed, and Hualei planted corn in the pots. Because the corn seedlings had already been cultivated in Huayingzhuang, although the time was a little late, it was still in time.

After leveling the land and applying sufficient fertilizer, it took more than half a month for the basin to be planted with corn seedlings. Hua Bud was very happy to see the vibrant corn seedlings. Because Rong Jin reminded him that corn was still the favorite of Emperor Shengwu.

Therefore, she wanted to try planting a crop in the basin. If the yield remained high, then when the barren hills next door were reclaimed, they would definitely learn from this and plant corn.

In that case, I would be ahead of the others and would leave a better impression on Emperor Shengwu. By then, there would be two seasons a year in the basin, rapeseed would be planted in autumn and corn in spring.

Corn and wheat are planted alternately on the hillsides that can receive sunlight. In this way, the income from planting on tens of thousands of acres of barren hills for a few years will surely be considerable.

The most important thing is that corn and rapeseed can be planted on barren mountains. After the harvest, there will be a lot of seeds, which can be used to increase the planting area in the next season.

In this way, corn and rapeseed can be promoted more quickly. After all, corn is only planted in a few cities, and the same is true for rapeseed. If you want to promote corn and rapeseed to every corner of the Great Sheng Dynasty, it will take a long time of persistent efforts.

Because Hualei had new plans in mind, he took better care of the corn planted in the basin. He also specially assigned a group of people to look after the corn and began to manage it in the same way as the Ministry of Agriculture did, where responsibilities were assigned to individuals.

On the east and south slopes of the East Mountain, where wheat had been harvested, tung trees were planted again because there were a few tung trees on the North Mountain.

Last autumn, Hualei collected tung seeds and squeezed out tung oil. He then used the tung oil to make oilcloth. However, tung oil and oilcloth have too many uses.

The tung seeds from the few tung trees on the north mountain were not enough to fill Hualei's teeth. When Hualei asked Uncle Fu to lead a group of people to collect tung seeds, Uncle Fu came back and said that there were not many tung trees on the ownerless barren mountain.

Sometimes there are only a dozen or twenty trees on the entire hillside. If Hualei wants to make more tung oil and oilcloth, if he only relies on Baihao, this number is definitely not enough.

So, Hualei started to think about planting some tung trees. However, tung trees could not be planted on ordinary farms, and they could only be planted on barren hills.

So Hualei thought that she could only plant potatoes and sweet potatoes on the farm again. Anyway, Hualei had quietly bought several farms in the past few years. There was more than enough land for planting sweet potatoes and potatoes.

In this way, the east and south slopes of Dongshan Mountain can be vacated to plant tung trees. After the tung trees bear fruit, we can continue to make tung oil and oilcloth. After all, if we only rely on white tung, the yield may not be high.

With the intention of planting tung trees, Huabud started preparing early. He first read a lot of books to understand the growth conditions and planting requirements of tung trees.

It is found that tung tree, also known as tung tree, grows fast, bears fruit early, and has high yield. Generally, it can bear fruit three years after planting, so it is also called "three-year tung tree". The peak fruit-bearing period can reach 20 to 30 years, which is a crop with great economic value.

The March Tung tree blooms in March and April, with white petals and purple-red stripes on the stem. It is monoecious. It begins to produce tuberculosis in May and matures around October. The oil extracted from tung seeds is called tung oil, which is of very good quality and has a wide range of uses.